A Meta‐Analysis of the Impact of Anthropogenic Forest Disturbance on Southeast Asia's Biotas

By N. Sodhi, T. Lee, Lian Pin Koh, Barry W. Brook. 2009

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The impacts of tropical deforestation and forest degradation on SE Asia's biotas have been documented, but a quantitative synthesis is currently lacking. We examined the responses of biodiversity to anthropogenic forest disturbance by comparing key ecological attributes between undisturbed and neighboring disturbed forests. Based on data from four taxonomic groups (vascular plants, invertebrates, birds, and mammals), six broad measures of ‘ecological health’ (e.g., richness, abundance, and demographics), and a range of different impact types from 120 articles published, we calculated the proportion of pairwise comparisons in which the measure of ecological health was lower in impacted than in pristine sites, as would be expected if forest disturbance was detrimental. The explanatory power of correlates of disturbance sensitivity was assessed using an information‐theoretic evaluation of a candidate set of generalized linear models (GLMs). Overall, 73.6 percent (95% CI = 70.8–76.2%) of 1074 pairwise comparisons supported the expectation that forest disturbance was detrimental to ecological health, with mammals being the most sensitive group. The median effect size was for pristine areas to have 22.2 percent higher ecological health than equivalent disturbed areas. The most responsive measure of ecological health was species richness (median = 28.6% higher in pristine), and agricultural areas were the most ecologically degraded (median = 35.6% higher in pristine). However, the GLMs revealed no marked differences overall between taxonomic groups, habitat impact types, or ecological health measures. Our finding implies that the sensitivity of biodiversity to forest disturbance is moderately high, but essentially universal, suggesting urgent forest conservation actions.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/905a443ac7acc9405c1e9f8eaa8cb1514e439147

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of land management on the abundance and richness of spiders (Araneae): A meta-analysis (2011, background): “As in other meta-analyses (Bengtsson et al., 2005; Sodhi et al., 2009; Winfree et al., 2009), is must be understood that ‘control’ (or ‘unmanaged’) and ‘managed’ plots differed in the kind of management recorded in each original reference, but shared any other kind of management typical of that…”
Primate responses to anthropogenic habitat disturbance: A pantropical meta-analysis (2017, background): “Our overall 24% reduction in response metrics to disturbed forests in this region is comparable with the 22% detected in a previous meta-analysis that did not consider primate responses (Sodhi et al., 2009).”
Aquatic insects indicate terrestrial habitat degradation: changes in taxonomical structure and functional diversity of dragonflies in tropical rainforest of East Kalimantan (2012, background): “Frequent anthropogenic disturbances here lead to immediate reduction in diversity and extinction of many arthropods (Lawton et al. 1998; Liow et al. 2001; Clausnitzer 2003; Hanski et al. 2007; Clausnitzer et al. 2009; Sodhi et al. 2009).”
Effect of fire on small mammals: a systematic review (2014, methodology): “the same study) was controlled for by selecting a random subset of the full dataset, such that only one observation from each study was fitted and this fitting procedure was repeated a total of 10 000 times (Sodhi et al. 2009).”
Trio under threat: can we secure the future of rhinos, elephants and tigers in Malaysia? (2010, background): “Mammals are particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic threats; a meta-analysis by Sodhi et al. (2009) revealed this group is generally more sensitive (in terms of richness, abundance and demographics) to human-induced forest disturbances than taxa such as plants, birds and certain invertebrate grou”
Biodiversity inventory and informatics in Southeast Asia (2010, background): “Nevertheless, these remnants will already have lost many species that are sensitive to local environmental stresses (Sodhi et al. 2009), and trips to the larger areas of intact habitat are clearly needed to find the majority of undetected species.”